Tuesday, January 07, 2014

USCCB president urges President Obama to grant relief from HHS mandate fines

The president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has
asked President Barack Obama not to implement the fines imposed by the
HHS mandate, which went into effect for many religious employers on
January 1.

“Your Administration recently relaxed the rules governing individual
health plans under the Affordable Care Act, so Americans whose current
plans have been canceled may claim a ‘hardship exemption’ from some
requirements,” Archbishop Joseph Kurtz of Louisville said in a December
31 letter.

“The ACA exempts small employers from the mandate to offer
health coverage, and you have suspended this mandate for all employers
through 2014.”

“One category of Americans, however, has been left out in the cold:
Those who, due to moral and religious conviction, cannot in good
conscience comply with the HHS regulation requiring coverage of
sterilization and contraceptives,” he continued.

“This mandate includes
drugs and devices that can interfere with the survival of a human being
in the earliest stage of development, burdening religious convictions on
abortion as well as contraception. To date, at least 90 lawsuits
representing almost 300 plaintiffs have been filed to challenge this
mandate, and the Supreme Court has agreed to hear two of these cases in
its current Term.”

Archbishop Kurtz added:

Many Catholic and other nonprofit institutions caring
for those in need through education, health care and other services are
not exempt from the contraceptive mandate. For reasons articulated by
the courts, the Administration’s final rule of July 2013 does not
alleviate the burden on their religious freedom.

Please
consider, then, the result of your Administration’s current policies. In
the coming year, no employer, large or small, will be required to offer
a health plan at all. Employers face no penalty in the coming year (and
only $2000 per employee afterwards) for canceling coverage against
their employees’ wishes, compelling them to seek individual coverage on
the open market. But an employer who chooses, out of charity and good
will, to provide and fully subsidize an excellent health plan for
employees – but excludes sterilization or any contraceptive drug or
device – faces crippling fines of up to $100 a day or $36,500 a year per
employee. In effect, the government seems to be telling employees that
they are better off with no employer health plan at all than with a plan
that does not cover contraceptives. This is hard to reconcile with an
Act whose purpose is to bring us closer to universal coverage.

The result is a regulation that harshly and disproportionately
penalizes those seeking to offer life-affirming health coverage in
accord with the teachings of their faith. The Administration’s
flexibility in implementing the ACA has not yet reached those who want
only to exercise what has rightly been called our “First Freedom” under
the Constitution.

I understand that legal issues in these
cases will ultimately be settled by the Supreme Court. In the meantime,
however, many religious employers have not obtained the temporary relief
they need in time to avoid being subjected to the HHS mandate beginning
January 1. I urge you, therefore, to consider offering temporary relief
from this mandate, as you have for so many other individuals and groups
facing other requirements under the ACA.